The wartime spending measure passed by the House last week and a related bill being taken up in the Senate put pressure on the Iraqi government to open its oil resources to foreign investment -- just what critics contend was the real purpose of the U.S. invasion.

The spending bill ties continued support for the war in Iraq to specific benchmarks that the Iraqi government must meet by certain dates.

Story Continued Below

Most of the benchmarks are not controversial and are seen as necessary steps to ending the war: Iraq must pass legislation paving the way for local elections, amend the constitution to give Sunnis more say in government, reverse the de-Baathification process throughout the country and equitably spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds.

One benchmark, though, has gotten much attention from the Bush administration. The current bill going through Congress would ratchet up pressure on the Iraqi Parliament to enact "a broadly accepted hydrocarbon law that equitably shares oil revenues among all Iraqis."

The language refers to a bill that the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent to the Iraqi Parliament on Feb. 26. The measure would open the country's fossil fuel resources to foreign oil companies. The bill faces steep opposition because it is seen as a radical departure from current Iraqi law and from the way other Middle Eastern nations have nationalized their vast oil resources.

The Associated Press reported earlier this month that Maliki fears the U.S. would withdraw support for him if he doesn't succeed in passing the current version of the bill. Democratic opponents of the oil benchmark in the House argued last week that Iraq should not be forced to pass an oil law favorable to foreign companies while the country remains under occupation.

Now their Senate colleagues must take up the sticky issue.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), a Democratic presidential candidate, has been lobbying to have language included in the emergency supplemental war spending bill that will prevent "United States control over any oil resource of Iraq." The Senate Appropriations Committee approved that language in its markup Monday.

"I was concerned that Iraqi suspicions about American aims in Iraq were endangering American lives," Biden said in a statement. "These misperceptions will not be easily changed, but this measure again shows that the American people do not have imperial designs upon Iraq and we won't be there forever."

Biden's effort, though, does not prevent U.S. companies from exercising control over Iraqi oil resources, as the current Iraqi bill would allow. Its passage has long been a singular part of the Bush administration's "way forward" in Iraq. President Bush, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have publicly and privately pressed Maliki to turn the bill into law.

The administration is also worried about more than just revenue sharing among Iraqis. In a Washington Post Op-Ed earlier this month, Khalilzad laid out the benefits: "It provides the legal framework to enable international investment in Iraq's oil and gas sectors, a break from the statist and overcentralized practices of the past."

"I would equate it to the significance of developing a new constitution," said Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), chairman of the Victory in Iraq Caucus and a strong backer of the war.

Liberal Democrats argue that now is not the time to pressure Iraq to open its resources to foreign oil companies. "We've got to be sure that the Iraqi people don't have a reason to be suspicious of us," Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) told The Politico before the House vote. "I think we should make sure that isn't why we're in the war, to secure oil rights. If it is, the White House ought to own up to it."

Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio), who also voted against the spending measure, said, "This war has been about oil. This occupation is about oil. These benchmarks are about oil," he said, adding that the privatization pressure "confirms the original purpose of the war. … Democrats must take great care so as not to be a party to this gross immorality."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), though, didn't see the bill as pressuring Iraq to privatize. "Democrats support an Iraqi oil bill that fairly distributes revenues among the Iraqi people in a way that the Iraqi people decide is best for them," spokesman Drew Hammill said in an e-mail.

For Wilson and other proponents of the bill, the decision to privatize doesn't belong to the U.S. "I leave it up to the Iraqis to make that determination," he said. "In any democracy, you'll have disagreements."

The idea that the oil law is simply a product of Iraqi democracy, though, galls some opponents. "Why (are) Zalmay Khalilzad and Condi Rice and the president putting such pressure on them to pass the law if it's none of our business," said Antonia Juhasz, an oil industry expert at Oil Change International and the author of a book critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. She recently wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times opposing the oil bill.

Juhasz said that many Democrats don't seem to understand that pushing Iraq to meet Bush's benchmarks could unwittingly hand international oil companies a victory, a charge echoed by Kucinich and Woolsey.

The Democratic strategy "implies that the benchmarks are a good thing. Democrats need to admit what the hydrocarbon law is and oppose it, not put more pressure on the Iraqis to pass it," Juhasz said.

For John van Schaik, an oil industry analyst with Energy Intelligence, the law is so obscurely written that it's hard to know what to make of it.

"It's written such that it's open to interpretation," he said. "Iraq will never accept a law that can be read as a privatization law, no matter how the Americans try to pressure Baghdad into opening up its reserves to foreign companies."

What's more, the violence on the ground would make it difficult for foreign companies to take advantage regardless of what the law says, said Erik Leaver, a research fellow who focuses on oil issues at the liberal-leaning Institute for Policy Studies.

No foreign oil companies are "going to jump in and do any more than they're already doing, simply because of the security situation," he said.